Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Virtualization allows the abstraction and pooling of hardware resources to support virtual machines in a virtualized computing environment, such as a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). For example, through server virtualization, virtual machines running different operating systems may be supported by the same physical machine (e.g., referred to as a “host”). Each virtual machine is generally provisioned with virtual resources to run an operating system and applications. The virtual resources may include central processing unit (CPU) resources, memory resources, storage resources, network resources, etc.
Port mirroring is a switch feature that may be configured between a pair of ports for the purpose of traffic monitoring, analysis, etc. During a port mirroring session, packets passing through a first port of the pair of ports are mirrored to form mirrored packets. The mirrored packets are then sent to a monitoring device coupled to a second port of the pair of ports. However, implementing port mirroring in a virtualized computing environment can be challenging.
For example, one known approach to implement port mirroring in a virtualized computing environment is to utilize Encapsulated Remote Switched Port Analyzer (ERSPAN) and Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE). To set up a port mirroring session using ERSPAN and GRE, one requirement is to specify an Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with the second port, to which the monitoring device or virtual machine (VM) is connected. However, such an IP address may not be readily available at the time of setting up the port mirroring session in the virtualized computing environment. Suppose the monitoring device or VM migrates. The originally specified IP address may no longer be valid, and a different IP address will need to be specified for the port mirroring session. Suppose further that multiple monitoring devices or VMs are desired for port mirroring, so that multiple analysts can independently monitor or analyze the mirrored data. The IP address for each of these multiple monitoring devices or VMs needs to be specified.